I use Pixel on GOS but i welcome any other apps that can help achieve this.
Background: I have a smart home system that i can use my phone to lock/unlock doors, turning lights on/off…etc. This app can be accessed via house wifi and 5G.
Problem: sometimes theres a lag when the phone switches from 5G to wifi, or vice versa. This would mean that the commands are “stopped” until we have stable signals. Eg. pressing open door would not open, i have to press open door again.
I would like to setup so that this smart home app is always on 5G. The rest of the apps can run 5G or wifi…
I remember on old Galaxy phones, you can do that. But is there an app?
Worth flagging a catch with the per-app rule approach: blocking the app on Wi-Fi isn’t the same as forcing it onto 5G.
Android routes an app over whatever the default network is, and that’s Wi-Fi whenever Wi-Fi is up. A per-app firewall rule denies the app on Wi-Fi — it doesn’t reroute it to cellular. So the likely result is the app has no connectivity at all while you’re on Wi-Fi, rather than quietly using 5G. Only the app itself can pin to a transport, by requesting a network with TRANSPORT_CELLULAR, and almost none do.
For the lag you’re actually describing — commands dropped during the 5G/Wi-Fi handover — the thing that usually helps is stopping the handover happening at the moment you press the button, rather than per-app routing. Worth checking whether your smart home app has a local/LAN mode that talks to the hub directly instead of round-tripping through its cloud, since that removes the problem instead of working around it.
Happy to be wrong if someone’s got Rethink actually moving an app onto cellular while Wi-Fi is connected — that’d be useful to know.
Why so many em-dashes?
Rethink DNS can be setup to have rules per app and I think it can do this.
Can confirm, I use Rethink for this. I’ll add that it is the only way I’ve found, and GOS specifically does not implement this feature.
